The Father-Daughter Dance
by Neftzer
Summary: Emma and Charming have been dancing around their relationship for far too long without actually addressing it. Or even having a scene on the show written for them to share. It's time they had a talk about it. This scene could occur at any time following Emma's return from the Enchanted Forest, the arrival of Neal in Storybrooke, and before the episode "Lacey".


_Regina had been defeated for the day, and the Charming family had retired to Snow White's Storybrooke loft for a small, family celebration…_

* * *

Emma Swan found herself behind the kitchen counter, watching as her parents, Snow White and Prince Charming, rejoiced with her son, Henry. Snow beamed at the boy, her face like an illuminated cherub's, her hands coming up to her heart as she told him again how blessed they all were that he was okay, how brave he had been. How courage was an important quality for a knight-in-training to possess. And Charming, he was all ruffling the eleven-year-old's hair, pretending to throw fake-punches at the boy's midsection.

Henry was positively eating it up. There was no disguising the happiness, the peace and…just, the _rightness_ of him being where he was, among two people who had grown to love him so dearly.

Emma watched from the sidelines as long as she could bear it.

In these moments, so intimate, so brim-filled with things she did not understand, but yet longed to, she often had to step away.

She bit the inside of her cheek hard and tore her nearly-watering eyes away from the scene before her, and quietly slipped out-of-doors, down the stairs, and out to the back stoop of Mary-Margaret's building.

She didn't feel like a brisk nighttime walk to Granny's for food or drink, didn't think a drive to the docks or a seat at the desk in the Sheriff's office would ease the tension inside her. She felt very much like one of the hardened bricks she had found to lean against: heavy, old, and stuck.

She was surprised, not too long after her own arrival, when the backdoor opened a second time, and David stepped out, clearly in search of her.

His face showed the shock he felt. "What? You're smoking?!" His face was set somewhere between confused and bemused.

Emma looked down, realizing she had been toying with the small clay pipe she had found upstairs the other day.

"What?" she asked, surprised to be accused. She looked down. "Oh, right. No!" she protested with a smile. "I mean, no. It's Doc's. He left it behind when he visited last week. Hasn't come looking for it," she considered the pipe, "so he must own others."

"I wouldn't smoke that, if I were you," David advised her. "Whatever's in it might not be…wholly of _this_ world."

"Right. Got it," she replied, half-wishing he would go back inside and leave her to the thoughts she could never quite shake anymore.

"Do you smoke," he asked, so tentatively she felt like he were about to ask for a light from a stranger. "I mean, _did_ you? Were you a smoker?"

She shook her head. "Not really, maybe here and there. But never, like, 'buy a pack' for myself."

"Oh," he said, pulling back from whatever his next urge was.

"You?" she asked. "Back…at your," she barely voiced the 'your', "home, did you smoke? A pipe, I guess?"

"Well, you can imagine; no cigars, no cigarettes there. But a pipe, sure. On occasion, back on the farm. A nice pipe in the evening after all the work's done." His face turned nostalgic. "Something to be said for that."

"Yeah," she said, feeling an antsiness start to come over her. A brisk walk alone to Granny's might be just the thing.

"Sort of gave it up when I met Snow," he offered, taking the pipe from her hand and looking it over.

"She make you?" Emma asked, a knee-jerk response. She knew those two never _made_ each other do anything.

"No. Things just got…_busy_ from that point on." He gave a soft chuckle. "No more time for slow evenings relaxing around the fire."

"Right," she said, trying to come up with some easy excuse to shed his company before her eyes threatened again to spill over.

"Which is why a night like tonight is so amazing to have. Don't waste it Emma," he admonished her. "In life—even on the side of good—you don't get as many clear-cut wins as we got today. Henry back and safe and—"

She shot her eyes up to the sky, trying to will the saltwater in them back to wherever it had originated. She half-laughed. "Is that you're polite way of trying to tell me to get back inside?"

His answer was gentle, considered. Even, diplomatic. "It's maybe my polite way of trying to ask why you're not in there celebrating with Snow and Henry right now."

_Okay_, she thought. _Fine. So we're talking about this_. "I just hadn't expected it to be so hard," she answered, her voice uncertain.

He understood immediately what she was talking about: their newfound status as family, their sort of non-reunion. The awkwardness that seemed to exists, unspoken, between them. His eyebrows raised with the question. "And it's hard for you?"

Her eyes widened in disbelief. "Well, isn't it for _you_?"

"Yeah, it's…" his voice trailed off, searching for the right way to put it. "You worry it's all kinda _Chinatown_, right?"

She exhaled hard through her nose. "You worry it'll come off very _Chinatown_."

His mouth came together in an expression of concern, of shared uncertainty about how to interact with his fully-grown daughter, a daughter in appearance possibly older than himself.

"I mean," Emma followed up, "looking all those years for my parents? Searching? I knew they might not want me." She shook her head. "When someone gives you up, that's always in your mind, somewhere in the back, that even if you find them, they'll just…reject you again."

She looked up, just in time to see David's face fall at her use of the word, 'reject'.

"But I see the two of you," she raced on. "And you're _so_ together, and I see Henry and he's so—easy with it all. And I don't think I know how to do that. To just-without trying, even-to _fit_. To belong." She gave a shallow scoff through her nose. "I've never even joined a club before. Not the Brownies, not high school yearbook. Not even a fitness club."

"You don't feel it?" he asked, concern all over him. "That you're a part of us?"

"Sometimes I feel like Frankenstein's monster. Something 'unnaturally created'."

"No!" he protested at the analogy, and for a moment they stopped speaking.

"And it would just seem creepy," he began again, after having a moment to take it in, "if I were to assure you that you were conceived in very much the common, natural way?" His eyebrows showed his own skepticism that this announcement would help.

She threw him a look that said, 'ick', but her face showed she appreciated his attempt, however failed, at humor.

"And even Neal," she declared, "I mean, the ultimate outsider. You're more connected with him…"

"What?"

"In the past," she said, "in the Enchanted Forest."

"What? No. We never knew him."

"But you knew Gold. Before."

"Yeah, sure," he agreed. "But I don't think anyone in the kingdom remembered Baelfire by then. If you knew Gold as his true self, as Rumplestiltskin," he gave an exhale, "you wouldn't expect that he'd ever had a wife, much less a child. Neal was—he'd left, I don't know, hundreds of _years_ before Snow and I were even born."

David looked at her, trying to gauge her acceptance of this information. "We only know Neal," he assured her, "because _you_ introduced us to him. We never knew Baelfire."

"So he's as much a stranger to you as I am."

"A stranger?" He didn't like to hear her speak that way. "No. I mean, the situation _is_ unusual…"

"Tell me about it."

"Who could have imagined we'd…"

"…share the same peer group?" she finished his thought.

"Right," he agreed, going on to explain. "Snow and I assumed, of course, that we'd age over the life of the Curse. So in that time between visiting Rumplestiltskin, learning about the wardrobe, and before the Curse was cast, when I would think about the future, I imagined you, _always_, to be twenty-eight years older when I first saw you, and Snow older as well."

"And you thought that I would know you," Emma carried on for him, "because she would have raised me, would have told me all about you. Taught me that one day I would meet my father." She stopped and made herself make eye contact with him. "And that totally didn't happen."

He did not look away from her, the night's darkness did little to shield them from each other and the hard truths they were finally voicing.

"But _I_ didn't know that," he protested. "I thought I was about to say goodbye to the two things I loved most in the universe. For twenty-_eight_ years."

She spoke before she had a chance to edit herself. "You _loved_ me?"

His face bloomed into a smile of wondering disbelief. "Did I _love _you? Did I love you when I had to fight the Queen's guards with you in my arms in order to put you into that wardrobe alone, without your mother? Did I love you? _Emma_, battling my way down the passage from our bedchamber to your nursery, I loved you _enough_ for twenty-eight years of separation. For the first steps and first words you would take and speak that I would neither see nor hear…"

His emotion at sharing this was so deep as he spoke that she could hardly comprehend it.

"You almost _died_ putting me in there," she reminded him as well as herself. "Mary-Margaret thought you had." She shook her head, still trying to take in his words. "You risked so much to be with her again."

He seemed to stop, pause and reorganize his thoughts. "So you think I only did what I did for _Snow_? For her and me?" He was incredulous. "That I only saved you so that you might return the favor one day and then save us?"

"Well, yeah," she confessed with a shrug. It made sense to her. "Without me you two could never be together again."

He shook his head. And then again, more strongly, as if to emphasize his point. "No. We would have found a way to be together again, Emma. It's what we do. But without you we would never be whole."

It was a very Charming thing to say. Her innate cynicism fought against believing it. "Yeah, but it's one thing to love a baby," she shrugged it off. "They're kinda cute. You can pretend they love you back, imagine they're going to grow into whoever you want them to be." She wouldn't fault David and Mary-Margaret for valuing her as the means for them to reunite. What they had was rare, and special. Anyone would fight for it, fight to save it.

David again shook his head, having none of it. "Remember when you gave up Henry?"

Her head came sharply up from where it had bent to look down at her feet.

"Ever been sorry for a moment over who he turned out to be? For even a second of all the trouble he's brought you? All the…_drama_ he plunged your life into?"

"Never," she said, defiantly, her voice throaty with conviction. No one must ever doubt that.

"And didn't you love him for all you were worth, for whatever length of time you had with him before they took him away? Didn't you ache inside to think how amazing he was, and how you weren't going to be able to be around to see him grow up?"

She wouldn't let him try to get to her with memories of that anguished time following Henry's birth and her decision, necessarily made _alone_, to give him up. "But Henry's easy," she protested. "Everybody loves him. _And_, he's still a kid."

"And you're not."

"No."

"So you're less loveable."

She could see he was going to try and dismantle that protest as well. "Well, I'm more _awkward_ when it comes to loving someone, to being loved."

"It's true," he finally agreed. "You're not a kid. I didn't realize that when I saw you again you would be so…competent, so able to handle yourself. I had to give up some of my expectations. I mean, what can I really teach you, now? Fishing? Animal husbandry?"

This; humor, she could handle from him. Could easily answer. "How to rule a magical kingdom?" she cracked.

He liked that. It made him laugh, cut some of the rising tension, the gravity of what they were discussing. "Actually," he grinned, "any time I needed a lesson in that, I just looked to your mother."

But he didn't let the moment prior get away from them. He went on, "I wanted to teach you how to ride, to pick you up when you got hurt and be the one to make it better. Have a talk about boys, and which ones to stay away from…"

"Yeah," she replied, half-wishing they could get back to laughing, as it was easier. "Water under the bridge, there."

But again, he continued to drive his point home, though he gave a small smile for her wisecrack. "A father wants to have wisdom, but what can I tell you—share with you-in this world that you don't already know about? Even, probably, know about far better than I?"

She didn't have to even stop and think before replying. She found the answer right there, ready to be said and shared. "I don't know much about being part of a family."

He had that Charming way of being totally persuasive. And she could tell he was not lying. He put no spin on his response. "But you _are_ part of it, Emma," he said, intense in his sincerity.

She flinched. "But I'm nothing like you, _neither_ of you. Especially…well, Mary-Margaret is so, so kind and gentle. Loving and good. She's probably the best person I've ever met. Just what a princess should be, right?"

"Now," he warned her not to make that leap. "You're only half-princess, Emma-and half-shepherd's daughter. Don't go beating yourself up." He let out a slight scoff. "Expectations in our Kingdom for shepherd's daughters are notoriously low."

Again, he graciously offered her a moment of humor to hide behind, to try and regain her footing, temper her emotions enough to go on. "But they should know how to shear a sheep?" she quipped. "Milk a goat?"

Again, the smile, "Now _that_ I can teach you."

The moment's respite in humor had given her the strength, emboldened her. "Don't you ever look at me and think, 'could it be true, is she really mine? Not just some trick, maybe, of Gold's?'"

"Never," his said, with complete conviction. "When I look at you I see Snow in your face. And my mother's nose. Absolutely my mother's nose. And," here he extended his hand toward her as though he were about to shake hers.

She gave it to him, not knowing what might come next. It seemed odd, intimate to touch him. It was not the same as with Mary-Margaret, with whom at least she felt the comfort-level of prior friendship.

He didn't say anything right away, but put Doc's pipe into his shirt pocket and placed his other hand on top of hers, his two enclosing hers in their grip.

"You have my mother's nose," he repeated, "and my father's hands."

His emotion in sharing this struck her more deeply than she could have imagined, and her nose crumpled with the surprise of tears instantly at-the-ready. As was her way, she pushed against it, but perhaps not as strongly as before. "You're saying I have man hands?"

"No!" he laughed, but when he looked up, away from their hands, she caught the water in his own eyes. "All this, all of us-is part of you, but you're wholly yourself. When I look at you, I think you could never have been anything but Emma, I think, even in our Land."

"Yeah?" she asked. He still held her hand in his.

"Your mother named you, you know," he told her. "Didn't even ask me."

"Really?" It was the first she had heard of this. "And what would you have gone with?"

"Gladwinna," he said, waiting for her surprised and disgusted reaction.

They turned toward the descending stairs through the door behind them, just in time to see Snow arrive and open it, coming to find out where they had disappeared to.

"In my defense," he chuckled with his daughter at the ridiculous name, "it was very popular at the time."

As her mother stepped out to join them on the stoop, amid more laughter, they let their handclasp drop, and Emma caught in Snow's face a blip of hope and excitement, which she worked quickly to bury from her view.

In this, the woman she called Mary-Margaret was not a bit successful.

**The End**


End file.
